Posts Tagged science fiction

I’ve been meaning to read Dune for decades now, but the thick paperback on my dad’s shelf always intimidated me a little. I’ve had some knowledge of the book, being aware of the Avalon Hill game and having started Westwood’s Dune II once. And none of the expectations that were generated by those were wrong.

Overall, it’s a very good book, though there were some concerns. I didn’t have too many problems figuring out the general outline of the story from near the beginning. Some of that is just because I have some idea what I’m getting into, but considering all that’s going on, I have to wonder if a certain amount of ‘telegraphing’ was intentional on Herbert’s part as a mirror to Paul’s own abilities to sense the future. However, the final climax has an extremely sudden raising of the stakes that feels out of place. There is an explanation, but it comes down to a single line much later, and the entire end just feels extremely disjointed from the rest of the book, since it is a situation that several points in the rest of the book say won’t happen.

The worldbuilding is very good, with the exception of being another SF setting with a time scale that is unlikely, with institutions existing for thousands upon thousands of years. But that’s a somewhat common feature of SF of the time. And it’s easy to ignore for all the things that are well done. Arrakis is that staple of SF, the one-terrain planet. But there’s a lot of nuance put into that terrain and ecology, and some very good inventions mixed in with parts that are more familiarly terrestrial. As the focus of the book, no other world gets any sort of real detail, but what is needed is given, and we’re shown just enough to see that it exists.

I can’t unreservedly praise Dune, but it is very well written, and certainly one everyone needs to read at some point.

The final volume of the Man of War series starts, as usual, in medias res with the USS Cumberland stuck in an impossible situation. Unlike the previous volume, this one flows naturally from the situation at the end, but there’s also a decided tendency to make the opening action bigger and badder than the previous.

Once out of this bit of formula, we’re back to our usual mix of well-done military SF, with plenty of action. The character side is less evident here; I assume it got crowded out by other concerns (or deadlines). The bulk of the book is involved in a daring and dangerous mission (or two missions, really) behind enemy lines. Some early parts of this got done a bit episodically, and I wondered if I’d accidentally missed something, but no, there’s just less bridging between sections than I expected.

Man of War is billed as a trilogy, but Brothers in Valor does not bring the action to a close. How this is considered ‘the end’ is way off in spoiler territory, but needless to say, I’m eager to see what happens next, and am disappointed that the next two (shorter) books are prequels, as opposed to the promised next series.

Despite some minor problems, overall the writing is holding up, and I do recommend the entire series as good military SF.

I can remember coming across this anthology in the library when it first came out. I had completely forgotten that I had actually checked it out and read it until a few scenes in the stories started resonating with me, and I started remembering having read them before. I’m pretty sure I never got around to reading the later ones though.

Overall, it’s a good anthology, and a great idea for one, though unlike many such, many of the stories here had been published before. There’s also a few non-fiction essays, which are naturally quite dated now. Actually, the stories are too; you can see a lot of their time in them. Overall, it’s a pretty good collection; here’s some particular notes:

“Reflex” – Basically an outtake from The Mote in God’s Eye, it’s just as well that it was left out of the novel, as it wouldn’t add anything to it. As a separate short story, it’s pretty good, though not anything special. Having some idea of the peculiarities of Langston Field ahead of time might help, as it’s not really described here, though the effects are.

“Spanish Man’s Grave” – A 1947 western seems an odd choice for a military SF collection, though Pournelle’s reasons are good, and it’s probably the best-written story in the collection.

“Marius” – This was the story that confirmed I’d read the anthology before, as the description of ruined Strasbourg (and Europe) rang a bell. This time, I had a lot more knowledge of reference of the title. A 1957 story, it has a survivable nuclear war in its past, and is really about pragmatism vs idealism. It’s the only story Pournelle saw fit to do an afterword to, and while what he has to say is true enough, I think he misses some of Anderson’s point.

“Ender’s Game” – Unlike most of the other stories, all my memories of reading this are gone, and I just remember reading the full novel a few years later. I actually like this 1977 short story better, as it’s much better focused, and I don’t care for a lot of the early added material in the novel (which I’ve always regarded as quite good, but not up to the accolades a lot of people have given it).

“A Death in Realtime” – One of the few new stories here, it definitely is a product of it’s time and 1981 computer technology. However, McEnroe has a real feel for the early computer/arcade generation that really helps give the story some extra punch. At least if you’re of an age to remember those times.

“Overdose” – Written in 1975. Vietnam merged with extradimensional invasion. For me, probably one of the poorest stories here, not counting the poems or non-fiction.

“Diasporah: A Prologue” – Nuclear war from the defender’s point of view. Israel is attacked by the surrounding Arab nations in a scenario that feels like it hasn’t aged much in the last 35 years. The “prologue” in the title isn’t explained, but seems to be a reference to the author’s later novel Diasporah.

“His Truth Goes Marching On” – I’m not sure of the propriety of an editor picking one of his own stories for inclusion in an anthology (especially after leading with he co-authored), but it’s good enough that I’m not going to actually complain. It’s the Spanish Civil War with the serial numbers filed off—but he didn’t actually do a lot of filing, since the background just transplants the entire general situation to another planet, complete with Spanish names. Still, well done, and another reprint of a 1975 story.

“The Defenders” – This feels like a Twilight Zone episode, and with an original publication in 1953, it’s about the right time for it.

“Unlimited Warfare” – Another 1975 story, this one featuring the law of unintended consequences as Britain and France have another spat.

“The Battle” – A 1954 story featuring a look at what happens when technology fights the biblical Last Battle.

“Ranks of Bronze” – A 1975 David Drake story (later turned into a novel I haven’t read) with a Roman legion fighting battles for aliens. No, really, it’s good. I often don’t care for Drake, but I might look up the full novel of this.

“I am Nothing” – A 1952 Eric Frank Russell story that shows its age. It’s not poor, but does have a terminal case of black-and-white psychology in order to make a point.

“Call Him Lord” – 1966 Gordon R. Dickson; Earth is a museum piece (or at least it looks that way to the rest of the galaxy), but considers itself to have a separate mission. I’d kind of like to see some more of the world.

“Quiet Village” – 1970, a bit late to be presenting the aftermath of a survivable (presumably) nuclear war, but it works well off the traditional Seven Samurai setup.

Whew, that was a longer list than I expected! There’s a lot of stories in here, and most of them are good, but not great. There are some real winners in here, though I have to imagine that someone who’d been keeping up with short SF in 1981 might feel a bit cheated by the fact that there’s only about three new things in here. As it is now, I don’t know how many of these have appeared elsewhere, but the age of many of the stories bears keeping in mind.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice was something of a slow burn for me. It was obviously solidly written from the start, but the plot is slow-moving, and unfocused. Early chapters alternate between two very different stories (with—more-or-less—the same viewpoint character) fifteen years apart. We’re dropped into an unfamiliar environment without many signposts.

This is deliberate, with the first and most obvious removal of signposts being gender. The main character’s language and culture downplays gender as much as possible, and she admits to having trouble telling genders apart in a multicultural galaxy, and speaking correctly in a gendered language. So everything in the novel is ‘translated’ to she, and since there’s not a lot of detailed physical descriptions, everything else is left to the reader to puzzle out (there is one major character unambiguously identified as male).

But this is really just the first hint that the novel features an unreliable narrator. It takes a fair amount of the book to even begin realizing just how unreliable she is. Breq, or Justice of Toren One Esk Eighteen, is an ancillary, a person who was taken, put in cold storage, and then revived and fitted with implants and hooked up to the AI of a large military vessel. The large ‘carriers’ have potentially thousands of these people on board, who serve as the troops for planetary annexations to the Radch. (Aaand… this goes into the big pile of ‘futures I don’t want to live in’.) The ship is gone, but she still considers herself the same person, and has no memory of existence before being part of Justice of Toren.

As such, there is a distance in the narrative that is part of what makes the book have a slow start. She presents herself much as you might expect such an AI to be; loyal, obedient, generally logical and orderly in action. But… still waters run deep. While she doesn’t present herself as having emotions, she does have them, and the lack is purely her own blindness to how powerful they can be.

Given that the main character is a single part of what was once a much larger corporate identity, you do start wondering just how identity and personality interact here. And that’s just training wheels for a much bigger question of identity that comes as part of the central part of the novel. This gets revealed slowly, and late, but the conflict is at the center of the entire structure of the novel.

I’d seen a review (which I can’t find right now) that told me this would be an interesting book. I’m glad I saw it, or else I might have missed this, and it’s an excellent read, that benefits from spending some time and thought as to what exactly is going on behind the mere words on the page. It will repay you in giving you much to think about.

Part two of the Dreamhealer’s duology naturally picks up right where Mindtouch left off.

Jahir starts his residency on Selnor, and finds that it has even higher gravity than the (for him) heavy gravity that he’d had to get adjusted to on Seersana. I was a bit tired on my own while reading this, and the combination of reading through Jahir’s struggles with a planet too heavy for him grinding him down really made me feel it.

Vasiht’h chases after him and helps keep him going as they get drawn into a medical crisis that strains both of them. (This gets into one of my problems with psionics, as Jahir’s purely mental (as in brain/nervous system) ability seems to be able affect something that from what very little description is given is more purely chemical.) In some books, this might be enough for the entire story, with a triumphant, but bruised ending.

But this is a book about two people, and not the external problems they come across. The crisis is maybe half the book, and definitely makes me think of Cordelia’s Honor: “But I’ve always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift.” The second half is rebuilding from a test that nearly kills them (Jahir especially), and a clearer return to the themes of the first book.

The pair really are one story. There’s a third book in the series now (and some short stories), but that’s a sequel, and a new story, and so isn’t essential to pick up immediately as this one is.

I can remember reading a fair number of books dealing psychic powers, adventure, and relationships in the ’80s. This is kind of a return to those, but much improved.

Psionics is never a favored subject of mine, though it’s not exactly a turn-off either. Here, we get some interesting exploration of the problems faced by a couple of contact-empaths (one in particular, really), though even with that focus, the entire subject is a bit… fuzzy. (Though the perception of emotions gets an interesting bit in the second half.)

However, the real driving force of the book is the blossoming friendship between the main two. There’s a decent supporting cast, but the novel maintains its focus so well, that many of them just serve to color their lives around the main events. Concurrent with that is the partial exploration of xenopsychiatric therapy that they are uniquely suited for. (It took me three chapters longer than it should have to realize just where the series name ‘Dreamhealers’ was headed.)

It’s not a heavy book, and it is very definitely part one of two; I’ve dived right into the second book as the first ends an appropriate break, but isn’t really the full story. It does a great job of presenting a pair of people who are not outgoing in nature, and perfect for each other. Recommended as a very good coming-of-age, alien/college environment, and lifelong-friendship story.

The second book of Honsinger’s military-SF series delivers pretty much everything you’d expect after the first book. Unfortunately, the beginning parts of the novel have some problems. I think he felt too much of a need to re-introduce things with an in media res opening designed to show off Robicheaux’s tactical cunning and generating suspense through use of off-screen actions.

That wouldn’t be too bad as a first-chapter prologue (though I still think there’s better ways to do it), but we’re treated to exactly the same kind of spectacle right afterwards, just a bit more elaborate this time. However, after that the central plot of the story starts taking over and the remaining 70%+ of the book goes a lot smoother.

There’s a good number of familiar tropes again, but as usual they’re well-handled, and they’re not allowed to sidetrack the book. (For instance, we get the ‘snubs from an incompetent superior officer’ this time, but it doesn’t occupy half the book the way it has in some cases.) There’s also a brief lampshade of this series’ relationship to the Aubrey-Maturin series at one point. We also get to see Admiral Hornmeyer a couple times again, and I have to admit the writing for him always makes me laugh.

Overall, its pretty much exactly what you’d expect after the first book: straightforward military SF. It shouldn’t be essential to read the first book before this, but I would highly recommend it.

Dragon’s Egg is a story assembled out of a few disparate parts. There’s the formation of a neutron star from a supernova, the discovery of said star by astronomers in 2020, an expedition to said star… and then there’s what’s happening on the surface of the neutron star, which proceeds through several different arcs.

That last, of course, is where the main imaginative elements of the novel come from. Incredibly, this is an exercise in hard SF, with the main speculative part dealing with the idea of the surface of the star hasn’t quite collapsed all the way to neutronium, allowing for complex interactions (and the evolution of life) utilizing the strong nuclear force. The resulting (very) alien ecology is never explored in any detail, but there’s plenty of details given in the chula’s (the intelligent life that evolves) biology(?) to drive home just how different everything is.

Since strong nuclear reactions are much faster than familiar chemical ones, it is posited that everything happens on the Egg at an accelerated pace, and this is continually driven home by each section being given a timestamp down to the second, with not a lot of time passing for entire generations of chula. The rise of an advanced civilization takes a few hours. This leads to a cast of characters that, in one part, is constantly shifting (“These fifteen-minute lifetime relationships are hard on the emotions.”), but are generally well-drawn.

This is ‘idea’ SF at it’s best. A suitably strange-seeming idea is proposed (what would life on a neutron star look like?), and then a story explores the ramifications of the idea. In this case, both the science and the plot are very good, and the novel is an overall fascinating read.

Enchantress From the Stars has a bit of an ambitious high concept, and pulls it off very well. The main ‘problem’ with the book is a galaxy full of inhabited planets where all the naturally-occurring intelligent life is human, or very nearly so; but paying attention to alien biology would be to miss the point of the book (and in 1970, it was still a somewhat acceptable idea).

The book is a clash between three civilizations, with a viewpoint character from each one. The ‘main’ story is given by the most advanced civilization, which has a non-interference policy that makes the Prime Directive look fairly tame. They keep keep themselves hidden from ‘younglings’: civilizations at a less-developed stage than themselves, including several star-faring ones, letting them find their own way, and assert that trying to help only leads to problems and stunted development.

But they do interfere on occasion. Such as here, where a less-developed Empire (I don’t think any other name is given) is colonizing a planet with natives that are still at a medieval level of development. The Service sends a small team to scare the Empire off the planet, and leave both cultures to evolve on their own. There are plenty of problems of course, and it makes a good YA adventure, with a certain amount of philosophy and growing up.

The main part that works is each of the three viewpoint character’s sections are written differently. They’re not announced or otherwise kept rigid enough to ordinarily keep it from being confusing, but the style changes between the three is so marked as to eliminate that problem. The native’s point-of-view is by far the most striking, being written with the feel of a lot of medieval tales, and is very successful. The Empire’s point-of-view conversely is the weakest, being in a conventional third-person, and being the least frequent, and least involved in the actual plot.

It’s a little too obvious with the points that it is making, but the novel does avoid feeling ‘preachy’, by virtue of the main character always being challenged to thing thinks out herself, so the philosophy is always a dialog. So it maintains a good flow and remains a fun read throughout, with the plot and characters always keeping center stage.

Zita is young girl (I’d guess around 10) who gets whisked away to wild adventures in space where she survives with courage, daring, and a number of friends she makes along the way. In this, it reminds me strongly of Mark Crilley’s Akiko, especially as they both are well-written adventures that kids will enjoy just as much as adults, but where Akiko tends to be quiet and thoughtful, Zita is headstrong and rambunctious (“Grabbing my notebook out of my hand isn’t ‘finder’s keepers'”).

A very good touch is that Zita doesn’t immediately throw herself into adventure. When she presses a red button on a strange device, and a portal opens and something reaches out and grabs her friend Joseph… she runs away. She has a very human reaction, and only later goes back and reopens the portal to throw herself in and rescue him. From there, there’s the usual ‘stranger in a strange land’ bit, as Zita lands in an alien city, has problems, runs into both nasty and nice people (and lots of indifferent ones), while getting one glimpse of Joseph.

The initial adventure wraps up in the first book, but Zita actually getting home takes the next two as well. As with anything, it’s hard to follow up a strong beginning, but the second and third books are just shy of the first one, and do a great job developing Zita and allowing her to get herself into trouble. The ending of the trilogy leaves things open for more stories, though at the moment Hatke has sadly moved on to other projects (which I will have to try out soon).

A highlight of the series is Hatke’s ability to design all sorts of odd creatures and whimsical places (which also reminds me of Akiko), and he also understands when to pull back and have a quiet moment contemplating the scenery. This is my favorite new discovery I’ve had in a while, and highly recommend it.